The Ireland Chair of Poetry is delighted to announce the winners of the 2021 Student Award. Now in its third year, the Student Award is an initiative encouraging the writing of poetry within the three universities that support the Trust.
The Trust has awarded the following students:
Eoghan Totten (QUB)
Elizabeth Oxley (TCD)
Kate Lawlor (UCD)
Viviana Fiorentino (QUB)
Judy O’Kane (QUB)
Noah Racey (TCD)
Each student will be awarded a prize of €1,000. All prize winners have expressed their delight and thanks to the Trust in their acceptance of the award.
Biographies:
Eoghan Totten (He/Him) is currently reading for an MA in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, as a Michael Longley scholar. His poems have appeared in Local Wonders (Dedalus Press), The Honest Ulsterman, Abridged, The Apiary, Romance Options: Love Poems for Today (Dedalus Press, forthcoming) and more. He holds a PhD in Earth Sciences and trains for the marathon in his spare time.
Originally from the U.S., Elizabeth Oxley is a Dublin-based writer and a student in the M.Phil. in Creative Writing program at Trinity College Dublin. Her poems and prose have appeared in magazines and journals such as The Poetry Review, Frontier, The Banyan Review, Peregrine, Ruminate, and Crosswinds. Her first poetry collection, After April Rain, was published in 2021 by Longship Press in San Rafael, California. She is currently working on her first novel. More about Elizabeth can be found at ElizabethOxley.com.
Kate Lawlor is a writer from Dublin. She completed the Stinging Fly Fiction Workshop in 2020, and an MA in Creative Writing at UCD in 2022. Her fiction has appeared in Sonder Magazine. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.
Viviana Fiorentino was born in Italy and lives in Belfast. Her poems appeared in anthologies (Dedalus Press, Salmon Poetry, Arlen House) and literature magazines (i.e. The Stinging Fly, Italian Poetry Review, Honest Ulsterman). Some of her poems have been recorded for the Irish Poetry Reading Archive. In Italy, she published two poetry collections and a novel (Transeuropa Press). She is board member of the Irish PEN and recipient of a ACNI grant.
Judy O’Kane is a poet and prose writer living in Dublin. Her poetry is published in The Irish Times, North, Landfall and the Manchester Review and The World of Fine Wine. She won the Charles Causley Poetry Prize, the National Memory Day Prize, the Irish Post Prize and the Listowel Writers Week Original Poem Prize. She holds a Creative/Critical PhD in creative non fiction from the University of East Anglia. She is currently reading for the MA in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre, QUB where she is exploring place in the work of Heaney.
Noah Racey is an American poet based in Dublin, writing in the tradition of the Fresno School. He is currently pursuing an M.phil from Trinity College Dublin at the Oscar Wilde Center for Creative Writing.